The present disclosure relates generally to capturing and analyzing data and, more particularly, to techniques for the real-time capture and translation of human thoughts and ideas into structured patterns.
Analysis of structured data provides important insights in data-rich environments found in various domains such as healthcare, commerce, intelligence, and law enforcement, among others. Often, however, the most valuable information is found in the minds of professionals and experts in these fields or in the documentation that they produce.
Unstructured data containing expert notes reflecting a summary of their analysis, opinions, and judgments remain underutilized. Access to, and use of, this data is often limited by the suboptimal performance of natural language processing (NLP) systems and by privacy concerns. For example, NLP systems typically fail to capture higher level concepts in textual notes when similar reference notes are not available, such as in admission notes summarizing a patient-doctor interaction. In such cases, NLP can only extract tokens that can form together a “bag of words” without the ability to reconstruct a pattern conveying the main ideas in the text by semantically and temporally linking these tokens to form a pattern. Moreover, privacy concerns limit sharing of narrative text as there is no existing way to automatically assure that the text does not include private or protected information. Even products of NLP systems are still regarded as potentially including private information.
Yet for it to be possible to leverage the knowledge and wisdom contained in expert minds and narrative text at scale, the higher concepts need to be machine-interpretable and sharable in a timely manner. There is a need for techniques to enable real-time capture of concepts and ideas in the minds of experts and in narrative text they produce in a structured fashion that is easily sharable. Patterns detected within the data can further facilitate performing research tasks by enabling information condensation, visual representation of the data, and comparison of the logical or mental outline of events, concepts, and ideas.